The IST trainee program is live and kicking 2017

The IST trainee program is live and kicking 2017

The IST trainee program is live and kicking 2017

The trainee program has well and truly started now, and the three teams have started the preliminary phases of research. But I'm getting ahead of myself, we should start at the beginning...

The IST trainee program

The 18 month long trainee program is IST's way of helping the fresh trainees to 'Learn More'. The work on the trainee tasks themselves take up 20 % of our time, while the remaining 80 % are filled with a regular workload. This is a great way for us to learn to know the people in IST and the teams, and to give us some actual on-the-job training. We've each been assigned a personal mentor that will follow our progress and guide us for the duration of the program. While we're going to spend 20 % of our time on working on the actual trainee project, we're also going to attend several trainee modules (more on the first module later) which are going teach us to attack our project in different manners than most of us are used too, and help develop our innovative abilities.

The trainee project

The 12 of us have been assigned into three different groups, and we're ready to start working on the project.. but what is it? Our project brief is to develop a service or an app in conjunction with IST Home. This should be something that is useful for interaction between students and guardians in their daily life, but connected to school life as well. By the end of the 18 months we will hopefully look at three good ideas for services, if not three fully implemented and published solutions. You might think that the brief is not very specific, but that is the point. Each of the teams are to come up with their own ideas on how to attack this problem, and just like a startup would, try to sell the idea to IST.

Module 1 - Malmö

The first module took place during 24-27 of January 2017 in the Växjö office and in Malmö. During our first day in Växjö we were introduced to the program fully, introduced to each other, and given a bit more information about how our trip to Malmö was going to be. All in all, a very informative day! In Malmö, under the guidance of Lucas Grind and Nicholas Arroyo, we were given lessons and tasks to complete in the fields of design and creative thinking. We were assigned into groups of 3-4 people and given different approaches on how to start the innovation process. The second day in Malmö we visited the company UsTwo, a creative design and development company that were more than happy to share their creative process, and telling us about how the teams there work together in a very open work environment. After our visit we continued our education about the creative process and completed even more tasks, and started doing some more work focused on the main task at hand. The last day in Växjö worked more as a summary of our experiences, finished with a presentation to some of our co-workers in the Växjö office.

We're all very much looking forward to the next module, 1-3 of March, where we get to see the new offices of IST Home in Linköping!

Who are the trainees?

I'm sure you're all wondering who the trainees are, which is why we're each going to post a short introduction of our selves here shortly.